Tempted to maybe start keeping track of them
with a Bullet Journal as my friend Sarah recommended here.

Beginning again with a new school-year schedule, with excessive back-to-school-year forms. The pot-luck welcome back dinners.
The sign ups. The packed lunches. The new routines. The inevitable hiccups
of getting used to who has to be picked up or dropped off where. Yesterday
bringing the wrong child to the doctor’s appointment over on the East side.
Picking Petra up early from daycare with a bit of an awkward shuffle
interrupting snack time and then pushing her through the crazy scaffolding
siren streets over in the stroller in the heat.

(Already I anticipate the criticism of readers questioning
why a three-year-old would need a stroller, but also maybe many of those
readers have cars and wouldn’t walk 2.5 miles in the heat in the afternoon for
a doctor appointment? Already as I write I am racing ahead to try to defend
myself against imagined attacks. Why? Is that the nature of so much online interaction
that I’ve let it seep into how I think and how I write?)

It would have been so easy to run over to the doc with
Wally. He was off already from school and so was Alex and they were watering
the garden while I was getting an entire hour “to myself” to work (after
grocery-shopping and school-supply-shopping and helping Wally organize his room
with a semi-functional homework area, which will last a day. Interrupting this
hour “to myself” to work to bring the wrong kid over. Anyway, it turned out
fine because Alex came over with Wally and both kids got the flu shot, Wally
disappointed they no longer recommend the mist and Petra happily volunteering
to go first, as these days she wants to be first for everything.

Beginning again with trying to get into some kind of
reasonable shape. And by that I mean jogging a couple miles at a decent pace
without being horribly out of breath on the brink of throwing up when I’m done.

Beginning again with the evaluation of a teacher training
program, work I’d taken a break from for the past several years. Thinking about
the teachers in their first difficult years reminds me—do I need to be
reminded?—of how much I’ve always wanted to be a teacher and yet I’ve never
even gotten close to a classroom outside of a few months as a substitute at MS
54 so many years ago. But that is just one dream of so many. Chase two rabbits
and you won’t catch either one. Another dream, a lost one, playing music.

Out on the river today listening to a song of Alex’s without
any vocals I came up with them myself and thought—I have to record that
tonight! Beginning again to record music? Maybe I am prompted by a totally
unexpected re-stock notice from CD Baby. They want us to send in more copies of
Gowanus Sessions.

That is good, because I looked at all the copies on the
closet shelf the other day and wondered if I should just finally recycle them.

Daydreaming about beginnings, like the one Pip Lincolne
writes about in Craft for the Soul: How to make the most out of your creative life. Her morning routine is so comforting sounding (although I don’t
understand putting the TV on, even with the volume down—why?). She gets up super early. Greets the dogs. Makes coffee and toast, writes three pages (adapting Julia Cameron's "Morning Pages") and then takes a walk. Simple enough routine, right? And when I read it I thought - she obviously doesn't have kids. But, turns out that's not true! She has three of them! Amazing.

I am beginning to have some time to work without resorting to crazy acrobatics
like the kind my friend Hein Koh has been talking about lately. Actually I've never had to work breast-feeding two babies at the same time, and don't think I ever could. If I managed, I'd have to add it to the list of things I learned from her.

As I've written here, DeSalvo's book Writing as a Way of Healing has been a touchstone for over a decade, and from the name of the new one, I had so many expectations about how she would help me get away from the racing and the relentless cacophony and the feeling of being hounded by social media and up-to-the-minute news and updates. But what she says, essentially, in The Art of Slow Writing, is that writing itself is a slow art. She brings a lot of research and great examples to her work to show the necessity of slowness. (And to debunk the myths of speed, pointing, for example, to Jack Kerouac's hidden revisions.) But any of us who'd ever attempted writing have known already how long we must stare at blank pages. How many times we have to retrace the same steps. Erase. Start over. Go back to the beginning. Tandem breast-feeding at the same time or not, begin again.

Comments

I know - pretty crazy! Glad this conversation is getting the attention it deserves. Here's another article: http://www.bustle.com/articles/183450-hein-kohs-viral-breastfeeding-photo-proves-motherhood-is-one-of-many-things-that-doesnt-hinder-womens

(It still frustrates me a bit that a man--or at least the men I know--would never need to baby-feed & work simultaneously...but...)

I love this chant to "begin again," a necessity really, especially for creatives, but one that feels so counter-cultural. To begin again means there is work ahead, but also opportunity, newness, discovery.

It sounds like Pip Lincolne has it all figured out. Are her children off at boarding school? Or perhaps self-sufficient teenagers?

I did some substitute teaching, post-college in my early 20s, and then chose not to finish my MA in Art Ed. But I keep thinking about teaching. I'm curious about the teacher training program and what you might do. Chasing two rabbits... I keep thinking about that one...

I loved the story of the swapped doctor's appointments--glad it had a happy/productive ending! I can't imagine anyone criticizing you for using a stroller! Is that a Manhattan thing? How could you survive without one? And I just love this sentence and this image "pushing her through the crazy scaffolding siren streets over in the stroller in the heat."

Yes it really feels like it's going against the push and pull of the throng...stronger online even it seems than in Herald Square...virtual noise for me lately is the loudest...the most intense battleground. Work ahead - yes! Pip Lincolne - maybe self-sufficient teenagers! I'll believe that until I hear otherwise.

The ever-re-appearing teaching dream. I do wonder if teaching is a go-to dream for me when I am meeting resistance or of it's a real, fertile ground that I need to embrace.

Thanks for what you say about the stroller. I think in Manh. it's understood that we walk miles a day and can't expect toddlers to. But I have gotten the slack/bad feedback more from attachment parenting suburban types who used the carrier only (I did and still do) but never a stroller, which is deemed too impersonal. No problem with the car tho!? Okay...sorry for my rant....streets full full blasting with sirens here in Chelsea past few days...